“This is Aubrey Sattalea,” the caller told me. “Can you come over to 1346 Pavonia Avenue right away, please? My wife is very ill—heat prostration, I’m afraid. If she doesn’t get help soon, I fear—”
“All right,” I interrupted, making a note of the address and reaching for my hat, “fill a hot-water bottle and put it at her feet, and if you’ve any whisky that’s fit to drink, give her a little in water and repeat the dose every few minutes. I’ll be right along.”
In the surgery I procured a small flask of brandy, some strychnine and digitalis, two sterile syringes, alcohol and cotton sponges, then shoved a bottle of quinine tincture into the bag as an added precaution.
“Better run along to bed, old chap,” I advised de Grandin as I opened the front door. “I’ve been called to attend a woman with heat prostration, and mayn’t be back till morning. Just my luck to have the car laid up for repairs when there’s no possibility of getting a taxi,” I added gloomily, turning to descend the front steps.
The Frenchman rose languidly and retrieved his wide-brimmed Panama from the porch floor. “Me, I suffer so poignantly, it is of no moment where I am miserable,” he confided. “Permit me to come, too, my friend. I can be equally unhappy walking beside you in the street or working beside you in the sickroom.”
THE SATTALEA COTTAGE WAS a pretty example of the Colonial bungalow type-modified Dutch architecture with a low porch covered by an extension of the sloping roof and all rooms on the ground floor. Set well back from the double row of plane-trees bordering the avenue’s sidewalks, its level lawn was bisected by a path of sunken flagstones leading to the three low steps of the veranda. Lights showed behind the French windows letting into a bedroom at the right end of the porch, and the gentle flutter of pongee curtains and the soft whining of an electric fan told us the activities of the household were centered there. Without the formality of knocking we stepped through the open window into the room where Vivian Sattalea lay breathing so lightly her slender bosom scarce seemed to move at all.
She lay upon the bed, uncovered by sheet or blanket, only the fashionably abbreviated green-voile nightrobe veiling her lissome body from the air. Her soft, copper-gold hair, worn in a shoulder bob, lay damply about her small head on the pillow, And her delicate, clean-cut features had the smooth, bloodless semi-transparence of a face cunningly molded in wax.
“La pauvre!” de Grandin murmured as I introduced myself to the frightened young man who hovered, hot-water bottle in hand, beside the unconscious woman, “La belle, pauvre enfant! Quick, Friend Trowbridge, her plight is worse than we supposed; haste is imperative!”
As I undid the fastenings of my emergency kit he advanced to the bed, took the girl’s wrist between his fingers and fixed his eyes intently on the dial of the diminutive watch strapped to the underside of her left wrist. “Seventy”—he counted slowly, staring at the little timepiece—“non, sixty-seven—sixty—”
Abruptly he dropped her hand and bent down till his slim, sensitive nostrils were but an inch or so from the girl’s gently parted lips.
“Sacré bleu, Monsieur, may I ask where you obtained the liquor with which you have stimulated your wife?” he demanded, staring with a sort of incredulous horror at Sattalea.
The young husband’s cheeks reddened. “Why—er—er,” he began, but de Grandin cut him short with an impatient gesture.
“No need,” he snapped, rising and regarding us with blazing eyes. “C’est la prohibition, pardieu! When this poor one was overcome by heat, it was Dr. Trowbridge’s order that you give her alcohol to sustain her, is it not so?”
“Yes, but—”
“‘But’ be everlastingly consigned to the flames of hell! The only stimulant which you could find was of the bootleg kind, is it not true?”
“Yes, sir,” the young man admitted, “Dr. Trowbridge told me to give her whisky in broken doses, if I had it. I didn’t, but I got a quart of gin a couple of weeks ago, and—”
“Name of a thousand small blue devils!” de Grandin half shrieked. “Stand not there like a paralyzed bullfrog and offer excuses. Hasten to the kitchen and bring mustard and hot water, quickly. In addition to heat prostration, this poor child lies poisoned to the point of death with wooden alcohol. Already her pulse has almost vanished. Quick, my friend; rush, fly; even now it may be too late!”
Our preparations were made with feverish haste, but the little Frenchman’s worst predictions were fulfilled. Even as I bent to administer the mixture of mustard and water which should empty the fainting woman’s system of the deadly wood alcohol, her breast fluttered convulsively, her pale lids drew half-way open, disclosing eyes so far rolled back that neither pupil nor iris was visible, and her blanched, bloodless lips fell flaccidly apart as her chin dropped toward the curve of her throat and the fatuous, insensible expression of the newly dead spread over her pallid countenance like a blight across a stricken flower.
“Hélas, it is finished!” de Grandin rasped in a furious whisper. “Let those who sponsor such laws as those which make poisonous liquor available accept responsibility for this poor one’s death!”
He was still swearing volubly in mingled French and English as we walked down the flagstone pathway from the house, and in the blindness of his fury all but collided with an undersized, stoop-shouldered man who paused speculatively on the sidewalk a moment then turned in at the entrance to the yard and sauntered toward the cottage.
“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur,” de Grandin apologized, stepping quickly aside, for the other made no move to avoid collision, “it is that I am greatly overwrought, and failed to—
“Morbleu, Friend Trowbridge, the ill-mannered canaille has not the grace to acknowledge my amends. It is not to be borne!” He wheeled in his tracks, took an angry step after the other, then stiffened abruptly to a halt and paused irresolute a second, like a bird-dog coming to a “point.” With an imperative, half-furtive gesture he bade me follow, and stepped silently over the grass in the wake of the discourteous stranger.
Silently we ascended the path and crept up the porch steps, tiptoeing across the veranda to the open window letting into the room of death. The Frenchman’s raised finger signaled me to halt just beyond the line of light shining through the midnight darkness, and we paused in breathless silence as a soft, suave voice inside addressed the stricken husband.
“Good evening, sir,” we heard the stranger say, “you seem in trouble. Perhaps I can assist you?”
A heart-wrenching, strangling sob from young Sattalea was the only answer.
“Things are seldom as bad as they seem,” the other pursued, his words, pronounced in a sort of silky monotone, carrying distinctly, despite the fact that he spoke with a slight lisp. “When ignorant quacks have failed, there are always others to whom you can turn, you know.”
Another sob from the prostrated husband was his sole reply.
“For instance, now,” the visitor murmured, almost as though speaking to himself, “two witless charlatans just told you that your love is dead—so she is, if you wish to accept their verdict, but—”
“Monsieur,” de Grandin stepped across the window-sill and fixed his level, unwinking stare on the intruder, “I do not know what game it is you play; but I make no doubt you seek an unfair advantage of this poor young man. It were better for you that you went your way in peace, and that immediately; else—”
“Indeed?” the other surveyed him with a sort of amused contempt. “Don’t you think it’s you who’d best be on his way? You’ve already broken his heart with your inability to tell the difference between life and death. Must you add insults to injury?”
De Grandin gasped in a sort of unbelieving horror as he grasped the import of the stranger’s accusation. On the bed before us, her pale features somewhat composed by the little Frenchman’s deft hands, lay the corpse of the woman we had seen die an hour before; after thirty years of general practise and a full term of hospital duty, I knew the signs of death as I knew the symptoms of c
hicken-pox, and de Grandin had vast experience in the hospitals of Paris, the military lazarets of the War and infirmaries throughout the world; yet this interloper told us to our faces we were mistaken.
Yet, despite the fellow’s impudence, I could not help a sudden twinge of doubt. He was unquestionably impressive, though not pleasantly so. Shorter, even, than the diminutive de Grandin, his height was further curtailed by the habitual stoop of his shoulders; indeed, there was about him the suggestion of a hunched back, though closer inspection showed no actual deformity. His face, narrow, pointed and unnaturally long of chin, was pale as the under side of a crawling reptile, and despite the sultriness of the night showed no more evidence of perspiration than if his skin possessed no sweat-glands. Clothed all in black he was from the tips of his dull-kid shoes to the wide-brimmed felt hat upon his sleek, black hair, and from his stooping shoulders there hung a knee-length cape of thin black silk which gave him the look of a hovering, unclean carrion bird which waited opportunity to swoop down and revel in an obscene feast. But his eyes attracted and repelled me more than anything. They were dark, not black, but of an indeterminate, slate-like shade, and glowed brightly in his toad-belly-white face like corpse lights flickering through the eye-holes of a death mask.
His thin, bloodless lips parted in a sardonic smile which was more than half snarl as he turned his cloaked shoulder on de Grandin, addressing young Sattalea directly. “Do you want to take the word of these ignoramuses,” he asked “or will you take my assurance that she is not dead, but sleeping!”
A look of agonized hope flamed up in Sattalea’s face a moment. “You mean—” he choked, and the other’s soft rejoinder cut his incredulous question in two:
“Of course; it is but the work of a moment to call the wandering spirit to its tenant. May I try?”
“Do not heed him, my friend!” de Grandin cried. “Trust him not, I implore you! I know not what vile chicanery he purposes to practise, but—”
“Be still, you!” Sattalea commanded. “The man is right. You’ve had your chance, and the best you did was tell me my poor darling is dead. Give him a chance. Oh,”—he stretched imploring hands to the sinister stranger—“I’ll give my soul, if you will—”
“Monsieur, for the love of the good God, think what it is you say!” de Grandin’s shouted injunction drowned out the desperate man’s wild offer. “Let this blood brother of Iscariot work his evil if you must; but offer not your soul for sale or barter as you hope one day to stand in spiritual communion with her who was your earthly love!”
The trembling, eager husband ignored the Frenchman’s admonition. “Do what you will,” he begged. “I’ll give you anything you ask!”
The stranger chuckled softly to himself, threw back the corners of his sable cloak as though fluttering unclean wings preparatory to flight, and leaned above the dead woman, pressing lightly on her folded eyelids with long, bony fingers which seemed never to have known the warmth of human blood in their veins. His pale, thin lips writhed and twisted over his gleaming animal-like teeth as he mouthed an incantation in some tongue I could not understand. Yet as he raised his voice in slight emphasis once or twice I saw de Grandin’s slim nostrils tighten with quickly indrawn breath, as though he caught a half-familiar syllable in the mutterings.
The stranger’s odd, nondescript eyes seemed fairly starting from their shallow sockets as he focused a gaze of demoniacal concentration on the still, dead face before him, and over and over again he droned his formula, so that even I caught the constant repetition of some word or name like Sathanas—Barran-Sathanas and Yod-Sathanas.
I saw de Grandin mop his forehead as he shook his head impatiently, clearing his eyes of the perspiration which trickled downward from his brow, and take a short half-step forward with extended hand, but next moment both he and I stood stone-still in our places, for, as a crumb of cochineal dropped into a glass of milk incarnadines the white fluid, so a faintest flush of pink seemed creeping and spreading slowly in the dead woman’s face. Higher and higher, like the strained shadow of a blush, the wave of color mounted, touched the pallid lips and cheeks, imparted a dim but unmistakable glow of life to the soft curving throat and delicate, cleft chin. A flutter, scarcely more than the merest hinted flicker of motion, animated the blue-veined lids, and a sudden spasmodic palpitation rippled through the corpse’s breast.
“It is not good—no good can come of it—” de Grandin began, but Sattalea cut him short.
“You may go!” he shouted, glaring at the little Frenchman across the resurrected body of his wife. “I don’t want to see you—either of you again. You damned quacks, you—”
De Grandin stiffened and his face went almost as pale as the mysterious stranger’s under the insult, but he controlled himself with an almost superhuman effort. “Monsieur,” he answered with frigid courtesy, “I congratulate you on your seeming good fortune. Pray God you need not call on us again!”
With a bow of punctilious formality he turned on his heel to leave the house, but the stranger sent a parting shaft of spiteful laughter flying after him. “No fear of that,” he promised. “Hereafter I shall minister to this house, and—”
”The Devil can quote Scripture for his evil ends,” the Frenchman interrupted sharply. “I make no doubt his servants sometimes simulate the holy miracles for purposes as sinister. Some day, perhaps, Monsieur, we shall match our powers.”
2
“FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE,” I asked in bewilderment as we walked slowly through the tree-leafed avenue, “what was it we saw back there? I’ll stake my professional reputation we saw that woman die; yet that queer-looking fellow seemed to have no more trouble reviving her than a hypnotist has in waking his subject.”
The little Frenchman removed his red-banded Panama and fanned himself with its wide brim. “Le bon Dieu only knows,” he confessed. “Me, I do not like it. Undoubtlessly, the woman died—we saw her. Unquestionably, she was revived, we saw that, too; but how? The grip of death is too strong to be lightly loosed, and though I could not understand all the words he said, I most distinctly heard him pronounce the ancient Devil Worshipers’ term for Satan not once, but many times. I greatly fear, my friend—cordieu, have the care!” he broke off, leaping forward and flinging himself bodily on a short, stout man in clerical garb, hurling him backward to the sidewalk.
Walking with bowed head and mumbling lips the priest had descended from the curb into the path of a hurrying, noiseless motor-car, and but for the Frenchman’s timely intervention must inevitably have been run down.
“Mille pardons,” de Grandin apologized as he assisted the astonished cleric to his feet, “I am sorry to have startled you, but I think no damage has been done, whereas, had I not acted in time—”
“Say no more,” the clergyman interrupted in a rich, Irish brogue. “’Tis glad I am to be able to curse ye for your roughness, sir. Sure, ’tis time I was payin’ more attention to me feet, anyhow. It’s the Lord Himself, no less, provides protection for such as I. You, now, sir, were the instrument of heaven, and I’m not so sure I didn’t see an emissary from the other place not long ago.”
“Indeed?” returned de Grandin. “I greatly doubt he could have prevailed against you, Father.”
“Sure, and he did not,” the other replied, “but I was after thinkin’ of him as I walked along, and ’twas for that reason I so nearly stepped to me own destruction a moment hence. One o’ me parishioners down the street here was called to heaven a little time ago, and I got there almost too late to complete anointin’ her. As I was comin’ from the house, who should be strollin’ up the steps, as bold as brass, but the very divil himself, or at least one o’ his most trusted agents.
“‘Good evenin’, Father,’ says he to me, as civil as ye please.
“‘Good evenin’ to ye, sir,’ I replies.
“‘Are ye, by anny chance, comin’ from a house o’ death?’ he wants to know.
“‘I am that,’ I answers, ‘and, if I’m not b
ein’ too bold, what affair is it of yours?’
“‘Are ye sure the pore woman is dead?’ he demands, fixin’ me with a pair o’ eyes that niver changed expression anny more than a snake’s.
“‘Dead, is it?’ says I. ‘How ye know ’tis a woman who lies in her last sleep in yonder house I’ve no idea, and I don’t propose to inquire, but if ye’re wantin’ to know whether or not she’s dead, I can tell ye she is. Sure, ’tis meself that’s been ministerin’ to the dead and dyin’ for close to fifty years, and when the time comes that I can’t recognize those the hand o’ the Lord has touched, I’ll be wearin’ me vestments for the last long time, so I will.’
“‘Oh, but,’ he answers, cool as anny cucumber, ‘I think perhaps she’s still alive; perhaps she’s not dead, but sleepin’. I shall endeavor to awake her.’ And with that he makes to push past me into the house.
“‘Ye will not,’ I tells him, barrin’ his way. ‘I’ve no idea what sort o’ play-actin’ ye’re up to, young felly, but this I tell ye, Bernardine McGuffy lies dead in that house, and her soul (God rist it!) has gone where neither you nor anny mortal man can reach it. Stand away from that door, or I’ll forget I’m a man o’ peace and take me knuckles from the side o’ your face, so I will.’
“With that he turns away, sirs, but I’m tellin’ ye I’ve niver before seen a human face which more resembled the popular conception o’ the Prince o’ Darkness than his did that minute, with his long chin, his pale, corpse cheeks and the wicked, changeless expression in his starin’, snaky eyes. I—”
“Pardieu, do you say it?” de Grandin interpreted excitedly. “Tell me, Monsieur l’Abbé, did your so mysterious stranger dress all in black, with a silken cloak draping from his shoulders?”
“Indeed and he did!” the priest replied. “When first I saw him he was standin’ and starin’ at the house where poor Bernardine died as though debatin’ with himself whether or not to enter it, and it was the long black cloak o’ him—like the wings o’ some dirty buzzard who did but wait his time to flap up to the window o’ the room o’ death—which first made me mind him particularly.”
The Devil's Rosary Page 21
